The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature

425 Pages·2017·9.76 MB·English

by  Bill Goldstein

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For Joanne Goldstein,
who was born in 1922,
and for Blake West,
who lived through it with me.
INTRODUCTION
The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.
Willa Cather, Not Under Forty
Some years are understood as pivotal in history—1492, 1776, 1865, 1914, 1945,
1968. Nineteen twenty-two is a dividing line in literary history. The World Broke
in Two tells the story of 1922 by focusing on four legendary writers: Virginia
Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, who were all similarly
and serendipitously moved during that remarkable year to invent the language of
the future.
Willa Cather began her 1936 book of essays, Not Under Forty, with the
melancholy remark about changes in literary fashion: “The world broke in two in
1922 or thereabouts.” Cather was thinking of the publication of Ulysses in
February and of The Waste Land in October of 1922, and the ways in which
those works seemed, all at once, to herald a new modernist era in which the form
of storytelling she prized, and had excelled at, was no longer of signal
importance. Her own novel of the war, One of Ours, was published in 1922 and
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. But Joyce’s novel and Eliot’s poem, and the
coincidence of their publication dates, had very quickly given 1922 a privileged
place in the history of literary modernism in which she and her work seemed to
have no share. She was a relic of an old literature the value of which had not
been preserved against the new literature that Joyce and Eliot represented.
For Woolf, Eliot, Lawrence, and Forster, the literary apocalypse of 1922 had
less to do with publication dates than with the personal and creative challenges
that indeed broke the world in two for them in 1922. Woolf, Forster, Eliot, and
Lawrence were, at the start of 1922, writers in deep despair, privately
confronting an uncertain creative future; each of them felt literally at a loss for
words. None of these essential pillars of twentieth-century literature could
foresee the work just ahead that was about to transform them as writers. The
Waste Land was published in 1922—but the drama of the year for Eliot had less
to do with the poem’s appearance than with how close he had come to not
finishing it or having it published at all.
Renewal came as each in turn experienced a sudden, if still tentative, spark
of vision. In early spring, Woolf thought to write again of a character who had
appeared in her first novel, The Voyage Out, published in 1915: this was Clarissa
Dalloway. Forster, picking up the abandoned manuscript of what was to become
A Passage to India, made his first significant progress on a work of fiction in
eight years. Both of them began to read the first volume of Proust’s À la
recherche du temps perdu, in French, which inspired their work, and on which
both drew as they continued to work through 1922 and beyond. Lawrence started
Kangaroo, his neglected but perhaps most autobiographical novel, written at
light speed during his hundred-day sojourn in Australia that spring and summer.
And Eliot, stopping in Paris for two weeks with Ezra Pound, began editing his
poem into a 450-line distillation of his years of intermittent and sometimes
aimless work. By the end of the year, the blank pages facing them in January
were filled: they’d found the words, or were making new words, new forms, new
styles, reworking the words into new shapes.
Rivalries and jealousy—including with James Joyce and the specter of his
Ulysses—had a role in these writers’ renewed creativity, as did the various ways
each of them gained fresh publicity, and increasing renown, as 1922 progressed.
Reviving the joy at the heart of their endeavors in 1922 is one of the goals of The
World Broke in Two. In February 1922, Virginia Woolf looked over her shoulder
at her friends and rivals and remarked in her diary with a mix of admiration and
awful surprise, “How these writers live in their works—How ambition consumes
them!” How right she was.
*
“It is after all a grrrreat littttterary period,” Ezra Pound wrote to T. S. Eliot in
January 1922.
This was a prophetic sentiment Eliot, or Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, or D.
H. Lawrence, was unlikely to have shared at that moment. Most people begin a
new year with a sense of resolution, a glimmering hope that by this time next
year dreams will have come true, or plans been achieved, or nascent ideas
become novels or poems. For these four authors, all among the major writers of
the twentieth century, the year 1922 began, frighteningly, with a blank page even
more starkly empty than usual because of personal travails and the open
questions of form, style, and subject that haunted them all. Their shared
questions were based in a shared fear: that a great (in plain English) literary
period Pound foretold might be approaching, but it would pass them by.
Virginia Woolf turned forty on January 25, 1922. It was an unhappy
milestone. For weeks before and after the dreaded birthday, she was stranded in
bed, “apparently the favourite breeding ground of the influenza germ,” and
alternately preoccupied by a lingering fever and her equally persistent failure to
have yet written a novel that commanded the precise quality of literary esteem
she aspired to.
After years spent strenuously avoiding writing fiction, her friend E. M.
Forster had likewise become painfully conscious of past and impending failures
of his own, and of his evaporating prominence. “So here I am with 3 unfinished
novels on my hands. Even mother must notice I’m played out soon,” he had
written in his diary as long ago as December 1913. One of these was his Indian
fragment—seventy-five pages of which he abandoned the next year, before the
world war. Born on New Year’s Day, 1879, Forster celebrated his forty-third
birthday on the first day of 1922, and as January got under way he was literally
at sea, on his way home after having spent most of 1921 in India, more time
abroad that he had hoped would offer some direction for the latest of his
incomplete novels. But when he returned to England in March 1922 from the
Indian sojourn that was meant to inspire him, he was no less adrift than before.
As a writer and as a man, he was trapped, having struggled with an unrequited
love for Mohammed el Adl, the married Egyptian tram conductor whom he’d
met in Alexandria during the war, as laboriously as he’d wrestled with his
continuing failure in fiction. That he was well into middle age and living with
his mother was lost on no one, least of all himself.
T. S. Eliot—“That strange young man Eliot,” as Virginia once called him—
was as uncertain of himself and his work, as adrift, as Forster and Woolf were.
He marked the start of 1922 in Lausanne, Switzerland, recovering from a
nervous breakdown so severe he had left his job at Lloyds Bank for a three-
month rest cure in October 1921. Eliot’s distress, in part, was rooted in the sense
of failure he shared with Woolf and Forster. Eliot, during his Lausanne treatment
and in London before and after it, had to face down his inability to make any real
headway on a long poem he had been contemplating for years. The many
disparate pieces of what would become The Waste Land consisted in part of
lines and fragments written during the war and before, including some bits from
his undergraduate days at Harvard. For many years, the poem existed only in the
future tense. Eliot could not put it together in a coherent way, and the
frustrations and collapse that shadowed him as 1922 began were the culmination
of years of attenuated effort.
“I am trying to finish a poem,” Eliot wrote from Lausanne to a friend shortly
before Christmas. It was “about 800 or 1000 lines … Je ne sais pas si ça tient.” I
do not know whether it will work. It was as if he could not express his doubts in
English, hiding his fear of failure in a whispered aside in French.
D. H. Lawrence might have been speaking for them all when as the new year
began he wrote his friend Earl Brewster from Taormina.
More and more I feel that meditation and the inner life are not my aim, but some sort of action
and strenuousness and pain and frustration and struggling through. Men have to fight a way for
the new incarnation. And the fight and the sorrow and the loss of blood, and even the influenzas
and the headache are part of the fight and the fulfillment. Let nobody try to filch from me even
my influenza.—I’ve got influenza at the moment.
As ill himself as Woolf and Eliot, who came down with influenza just as Woolf
became sick, he was also as much at odds with domestic life as Eliot and Forster,
anxious for change, restless with routine, almost allergic to his surroundings, and
as eager as Woolf, Forster, and Eliot to start on new work. Lawrence and his